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A life of Samuel Johnson? One would think the competition rather stiff for such an undertaking, since, by Walter Jackson Bate's own repeated admission, James Boswell's “Life of Johnson” remains “the single most famous work of biographical art in the whole of literature.” But as Dr. Bate, who is now Lowell Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, also takes pains to point out, Boswell's biography presents a “somewhat specialized” view of Johnson. “The first half of Johnson's life occupies little more than a'tenth of the work. Less than a quarter takes him up to fifty‐three, when his life was more than two‐thirds over; and a full half of the book is devoted to Johnson's last eight years, from sixty‐seven to seventy‐five.”

Moreover, Boswell shows Johnson in a highly masculine world—that of The Club and the taverns. He consequently exaggerates the picture of Johnson as a conversationalist—even misleading us about the frequency with which he inserted “Sir” into his remarks and about his taste for being addressed as “Dr. Johnson,” which in fact he rather disliked—and he underplays his subject's importance as a writer. Finally, there are many things about Johnson's life that Boswell simply didn't know. After all, he wasn't absorbed into Johnson's life to the degree that legend has made it appear. During the 21 years he knew Johnson, the total amount of time he spent in his presence adds up to less than a year and a half.

Much Left to Do In short, there remains a great deal for the modern biographer to do, and Professor Bate, who taught his popular “The Age of Johnson” at Harvard for 30 years and has edited four volumes of the new “Yale Edition of Johnson,” not only does most of it, he also does it magnificently.

The picture that Boswell presents of Johnson is by no means the only area of misconception that Professor Bate's biography clears up. From it we also get a considerably revised view of everything from Johnson's politics and religion to his feelings about travel, his attitudes as a literary critic and his sexual inclinations. Far from being the image of stodgy conservatism that a combination of Boswell, Thomas Babington Macauley's “Whig interpretation” of British history, and our present tendency to misunderstand 18thcentury Toryism has propagated, Johnson's politics in fact bore resemblance to what these days would be called liberalism.

As for his religious attitudes: Professor Bate makes it clear that he was not at all “a conventional Church of England man who differed from others only in the superior firmness of his beliefs and his militant sectarianism.

[R]eligion for Johnson, at least in its deeper implications, involved far more of inner struggle (as well as being a far more private concern) than the conventional picture of him could begin to suggest.”

And it is not true, as some scholars have argued, “that Johnson had a deeply masochistic nature, which was seeking erotic expression.” Professor Bate also denies that Johnson developed an arrangement with Mrs. Henry. Thrale, whose family “adopted” him in 1766, when he was 56, and succored him nearly to the end of his life. The supposed arrangement provided that “she would chain and perhaps flog him, or else he was trying—at least uncon sciously—to maneuver her into a situation where this could happen.” All the evidence for this is metaphorical, Professor Bate argues; the secret with which Johnson had entrusted Mrs. Thrale was actually his fear of going insane.

But such basic clarifications aside, Professor Bate wears his scholarship lightly. What makes “Samuel Johnson” powerful—even thrilling at times—is its author's performance as a speculative psychologist. Evidence now indicates that Johnson suffered two severe nervous breakdowns during his lifetime —one when he was a young man and, for lack of money, had had to give up Oxford after a year and return to his dreary home without prospects for the future; the other when he was in his middle 50's. Professor Bate offers a more or less orthodox Freudian explanation for these crises—a complex amalgam of overpowering superego, negative identity with a failed and melancholy father, and aggression turned inward against the self—all of which manifested itself in overwhelming depression and indolence.

In Flight From Self

This analysis is interesting enough by itself in Professor Bate's treatment. But where it becomes truly fascinating is in its relationship to Johnson's working habits when he was not in severe psychological difficulty. According to Professor Bate, it was in part to escape the hell of subjectivity that Johnson acquired such an extraordinary range of knowledge, about everything from law to butchering. But Johnson's quirkiness, says the author, also explains why he failed to write anything under his own signature until he was nearly 50, and why, when he was able to write, he worked so close to his deadlines that many of his essays—including some of his best—were printed without the benefit of revision or even a single reading by their author.

Johnson's life is, in short, reassuring to anyone who has ever faced the terror of a blank piece of paper. In fact, it is reassuring to anyone who has ever faced the terror of being alive. Professor Bate observes at the very beginning of his biography: “The reason why Johnson has always fascinated so many people of different kinds is not simply that Johnson is so vividly picturesque and quotable, though these are qualities that first catch our attention. The deeper secret of hypnotic attraction, especially during our own generation, lies in the immense reassurance he gives to human nature, which needs—and quickly begins to value—every friend it can get.” The proof of these remarks is more than amply demonstrated in the that follows them.